Dust and Ashes
by Lady Elina
Summary: ...In those moments they start a fire within each other. It is better to put one’s hand into it and burn than to fade away quietly and unnoticed... Slash warning, Sirius x Remus.
1. The Ashes

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_We ought to love life's long hours of sickness_

_and narrow years of longing_

_like the brief moments when the desert flowers._

(Edith Södergran, _Nothing_. Transl. by David McDuff.)

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**1 The Ashes**

Remus Lupin is thinking of dust and ashes.

He is thinking of the dust in the rooms of the old Black family house. The fluffy rolls of it prowling sleepily under the ponderous, gloomy furniture; the thick layers of it resting on the large books squashed onto the shelves; the mountains and plains of white-grey ashes in the fireplaces. He is thinking of animal-sized clouds of dust and human-sized piles of ashes and their facelessness, their namelessness. Nothing tells now whether the dust originates from the clattering shoes of an important visitor in the distant past, or from the velvet drapes of a four-poster where a sleepless inhabitant once writhed without rest; or whether the ashes are the remains of a tree marked with someone's initials, or perhaps of a letter written in bitter or longing words.

Dust and ashes have been deprived of their own stories, Remus thinks, that is why they don't have a face. They are all that is left when the soul is ground away. Anonymous particles blocking space and time.

They have been cleaning in the house since the morning, chasing away the stuffy coldness and sticky reek of the past, making space for light and life corner by corner. Yet the claws of the memories are deeply hooked into the flesh of the house, and darkness is unwilling to leave a place it has grown used to call home.

Sirius Black is sitting on the heavy green bedcover of a four-poster. Remus notices the dark hem of Sirius's robes is light with dust and that there's a sprinkle of ashes in his hair. Remus reaches out to brush the ashes away, letting his hand linger in the coarse, black hair. He feels Sirius's breath on his forearm, studies the movements of the bright eyes, and is almost certain Sirius shivers slightly.

Remus is playing, and he isn't playing alone. It has been going on for weeks, their common game of observation and furtive touches and unspoken want. They look at each other more often and longer than necessary, and their fingers rest in the folds of the robes or even daringly, fleetingly on the skin as if unnoticed, and sometimes their faces almost touch and they sense the warmth emanating from each other. But they haven't broken the limits yet, not their own, not each other's. They haven't yet pushed aside time: the mute years that stand between them, deformed by efforts to exist without the other. And these past months that have been quivering like air above fire, full of efforts to understand that while years behind cannot be undone, moments ahead are still theirs to shape.

Remus is thinking he should probably leave for his own place, because outside the light is diminishing, and Sirius is looking weary. But he is also thinking of Sirius's taste and wondering if it has changed, or if it still has the same sharply sour aroma of salt. He is looking at Sirius and thinking and the moments are growing longer with shadows.

After some time, in this lightless room, in the middle of dust and ashes, Sirius speaks.

"Those tattered robes of yours, Moony", he says, "make you look bloody old. Take them off."

The grin on Sirius's face is suddenly bright enough to glow in the dark, and it doesn't taste like ashes on Remus's lips, but like flames.

And so Remus stays.


	2. The Fire

**2 The Fire**

Remus knows what Sirius wants when he gets up on his feet from the kitchen floor and turns his gaze to Remus from the fireplace, where Harry's face has disappeared a moment earlier.

Sirius wants to hit all the locks into splinters with hissing, crackling charms, to scratch down the high walls that are rustling around them dark and scornful, to undo every spell that keeps the house together. Sirius is fighting not to become fused into the childhood home he hates, but he is suffocating, dispelling. The world has been narrowed down into those rare moments they spend alone at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, and those moments are not always good. Sometimes, when the atmosphere of the house bites into them maliciously, Remus feels life and colour have already leaked out of them and they are hardly more than two old worn patterns on the torn wallpaper.

In those moments they start a fire within each other. It is better to put one's hand into it and burn than to fade away quietly and unnoticed.

This is one of those moments, and Remus knows it.

Sirius's grip is hard and demanding as he grabs Remus's waist and shoves him down to the kitchen table. The wooden surface of the table is warm against his cheek; there is a faint smell of smoke and wine and humidity of the old house in the substance of it. Remus contemplates whether he should remind Sirius that the hideous, pouty house-elf may be lurking behind the door and that for all he knows, Harry with his Floo powder may re-appear in the fireplace any time. But Sirius's hands are all over him and around him and inside him, and nothing discharges from his mouth but pleas and sounds of want. Sirius is impatient, fierce, his fingers squeeze around Remus's wrists, chaining them to the table, and on the bare skin of his neck Remus feels the rough shape of the marks Sirius's mouth leaves on him. He knows tomorrow they will be dark, sore and difficult to hide.

The pleasure is a greater surprise to him than the pain.

At first, it discerns itself weak and thin somewhere in the midst of the jagged thrusts and then grows in a persistent vein into a gnawing, burning nucleus that radiates into all of his body, until Remus is aware of nothing but Sirius inside him, the flesh and the movement and the whispers. His scratching nails gather layers of lacquer off the table surface and of skin off Sirius's thighs; his voice falls apart in wordless patterns and is stopped by the wall of Sirius's fingers in his mouth. Their spasms follow each other in quick, sighing bursts. Remus feels Sirius's arms twist around him, and they fall onto the floor in an exhausted tangle, like wounded fighters seeking support in each other after a battle.

Sirius's touch is soft on Remus's skin and its restlessness has been wrapped into languor for a moment. Remus looks at his lover like he did years ago in a different, less broken and more hopeful world. He thinks of the dust and ashes around them, and the fact that in the middle of it all they have nothing but a cage and a battlefield and a fire. He doesn't know if they will ever have anything else again.

They make promises to each other that neither one of them has the power to make.

There is something in those promises to curl around, when the fire dies away.


	3. The Minutes

**3 The Minutes**

Remus is not sure why Sirius wants this, but he doesn't ask. Sirius's eyes sparkle restlessly when his gaze interlocks theirs. Remus holds up his wand and whispers:

"_Legilimens_."

At first he sees nothing. It doesn't surprise him, for this skill is blind lucky hits rather than something he masters. But slowly a strange feeling creeps into him: it is as if he is walking in the midst of memories and feelings floating on the surface of Sirius's mind.

The images come in a blurred rush, overlapping each other.

A black-haired teenaged boy is yelling at a grim-looking woman until an ominous man strides into the room and slaps the boy's face violently. A languished man lying on a narrow bed is listening to the wailing filtered by the stone walls of the cell. A chilly front of black creatures is approaching Sirius, who has collapsed onto the ground, but something of silvery shimmer is running towards them over moonlit water.

A slender bespectacled boy is passing fingers through his black hair and smiling. Harry – or is it James? – shoots into the sky on his broomstick. A green-eyed baby reaches out for Sirius's face, Lily and James are beaming and laughing. But then it is night, the house is in ruins, and there is no light anywhere, not that night and not for many, many years.

Sirius's face is anxious, concentrated. He is struggling to show Remus something.

The flow of images grows clearer. Remus sees an animal, no, two animals. A night of green-black vines, of darkness coloured by stripes of moonlight is rushing by, a wolf is moving like a powerful dream, followed by a black dog. The whining, writhing shadow of the animals is rolling on the ground until the wolf presses itself down, offers its neck for the dog to bite as a sign of surrender. The dog nibbles the wolf's neck gently, and the wolf whimpers with pleasure, tameless, yet tamed.

Remus is the wolf and the wolf is Remus, sitting in the Shrieking Shack pale, trembling. He is a child, an adult, scintillating, grey and everything else, he is ten million different Remuses who are all the same. He is bright and sharp-edged on a shadowy background. And finally Remus is bare and soft and hard, hasty and fumbling and willing, glowing and full. And long years later changed, more patient, wearier, but his expression is still the same as he looks at Sirius.

The bare and soft and hard Remus is lying on a bed and laughing a happy, quiet laughter, pointing at the drawn curtains, putting a finger on his lips, listening to if there is anyone else in the Gryffindor dormitory. When there is no sound, he reaches for Sirius to pull him into his arms --

And Sirius reaches his arm out in the present time and touches Remus's face --

-- and the flow breaks, because Remus has closed his eyes, his hand is trembling fiercely, the wand falling down to the floor. He hears Sirius's quickened breath and realises that although it has only been minutes, they have spent many moons, years, entire lifetimes standing there.

Remus is sure he knows but he still asks:

"Why?"

"I wanted you to know."

"I know, Padfoot," Remus replies.

Love is love even when it remains unspoken, he thinks, but doesn't say it. Words would only shatter it into dust and ashes, this something that doesn't fit inside any words.

Remus pushes Sirius onto the bed, and neither one of them is thinking of the past or the future anymore.


	4. The Hours

**4 The Hours**

Remus is trying not to think of dust and ashes.

He is lying on the heavy green bedcover of a four-poster in a room beyond which the world has been narrowed down into a display of words he never spoke to Sirius, places they never went together, things they were going to do when the captivity and hiding and war would be over. And of course, also a display of everything they did do. The world has become cramped and somehow sharper, its colours and sounds cut into Remus when he is moving in it and also when he isn't. The most bearable thing is to lie still and let hours pass by randomly, stubbornly, at their own pace that cannot be predicted or measured.

It is not that he means to shut the world out, he just needs a break from it: the lawn he crossed earlier in the summer with Padfoot, who was chasing butterflies, the old muggle song that may play on the radio anytime and Sirius used to sing off-key ("...hot tramp, I love you so!"), the book he lent to Sirius to shorten his long, narrow hours. The book is still lying on the bedside table, opened somewhere around page ten, its back pointing towards the ceiling, but Remus is too tired to rise up on his elbows and reach out to remove it from his sight. He closes his eyes. It is easier that way.

Bitterness has had many chances with him, but he has always penetrated it mercilessly, torn it open with his quiet determination and ability to find laughter in unexpected places, thrown it around until it has stopped floundering. Bitterness has seen him strong and it has seen him weak, and it has never survived their encounters yet.

But he hasn't been this weak before.

He needs to think his teeth and claws can still tear. He needs to believe some day he will be able to say it is a great fortune to be alive, a rare and precious gift indeed, and mean what he says.

But that day is not now, now it is night. Tonight he will lie on the dark green bedcover of the four-poster fearing the only thing he can still fear: time. Because an hour from now he will have forgotten as much of Sirius as it is possible to forget in an hour's time, and it seems like an irreplaceable loss. When many enough hours have passed, he will no more be able to recall Sirius's scent, and after more hours his touch on Remus's skin will be more of a decorated product of imagination than a real memory, and slowly by the hours Sirius's face will become unclear in his mind, until he can only see a blurry figure that goes by the name of Sirius Black in his memory.

Remus knows to live it is essential to forget. But right now he would rather remember.

Tonight in this lightless room in the midst of dust and ashes he will remain awake through every hour that carries him further away from Sirius, and he will feel every mark those hours leave on him. He will stare at the night skies through the window and he will not see the thin arc of the moon or the stars, for they are all hidden behind a thick veil of clouds. But he knows they are there, out of reach yet eternal.

There is something in that thought to curl around, as a new hour starts its spin and flows away.


End file.
